Someone to Run With

A friendship in nine acts (and who knows how many miles).

Within hours, we lay starfished on our respective beds in our room at what turned out to be not so much a spa but rather a rustic wilderness retreat that had already basically closed down for the season. We were the only guests. We'd been dreaming about cold postmarathon beers only to have the idea crushed by the discovery that we were in a dry county and that beer was 25 miles back down the road. Even the hot springs were a 10-minute hike from our room, and now that both of us felt like we'd been beaten with a big stick for three hours and thirty minutes (and three seconds, if you care to know), there would be no hiking. Not even to the other side of the room where we had left the Advil marooned on a dresser.

"I'll pay you five dollars to bring me three Advil," Clare said.

"Ha," I said from my spot on the bed.

"Ten dollars," she said. "And I'll give you an extra 200 if you drive back to town and get us a six-pack."

"Ha, ha," I said. But then, feeling suddenly like I owed her a whole lot more than this, I stood up and hobbled across the room to fetch the ibuprofen, free of charge.

5. "How many miles do you think we've run together?" I ask Clare one day on the phone.

"Hundreds," she says. "Definitely. Over a thousand? Two thousand? I don't know."

We mull this over for a minute and then decide it's not worth calculating.

6. After a couple of years in Santa Fe, I moved back east, to a small town in rural Maine, far away from Clare and Big Jim and the Quantum Xrroid machine. Suddenly, I was running alone again, on the empty country roads near where we lived. The silence was daunting. It rained a lot. My seven-mile runs became six-mile runs and then four-mile runs. Back in New Mexico, Clare had taken up yoga.

One fall day, she and her boyfriend arrived for a visit. Clare and I immediately put on our running shoes and headed out the door. It was deer season. I made her wear a blaze-orange cap so she wouldn't be confused for a deer, since in western Maine deer were a lot more common than runners. We started down the long, narrow road that ran ribbonlike through the dense forest near my house. The trees seemed to lean in on us, idly dropping red and golden leaves as we passed under-a scene that might have felt sylvan and magical were it not for the bursts of rifle fire coming from the woods all around us. It took less than a mile for me to understand that Clare and I were both miserable. I was lonely living out in the country, and her relationship was ending, in excruciating slow motion. We talked a little but not a lot. We just ran hard.

A few months later, the boyfriend was gone. Clare and I were on the phone. She was lying on the floor in New Mexico. I had been promising her that someday soon life would be so good that this would all seem trivial, that she'd be thankful it happened, even. I tried to make her bet me money on it, but she wouldn't do it.

"Okay, you have to get up now," I said to her.

"I don't think I can."

"Get up and go outside and go for a run. It will help," I said. "I promise, I promise, I promise."